Compression Programs

[georgyboy]

HI, I was wondering if anyone knew of a really good compression program. I currently use winzip but its not compressing much of my file. I am trying to shrink a video file so that its quicker download when clicked on my site. Is there any programs out there that are better??? When using winzip i only went from 17MB to 16MB
Thanks alot

 

[dakota81]

The problem is, video codecs are designed to compress the data as far as they can go already... Hence, WinZip or any other data compression software will be rather worthless. The only option is to either split up the video into several files that can be individually downloaded, or to recompress the video using a lower bitrate, better codec, lower frame rate, lower audio rate, lower screen size. You're guaranteed to loose quality recompressing it, but sometimes the size is worth the lower quality.

http://www.virtualdub.com

This is a rather full featured avi creation/compression software you can use.

 

[may1hem]

WinRAR and WinACE are supposedly marginally better at compressing media files, but as Dakota81 says, video files are already heavily compressed and so further compression is negligible. If you're unfamiliar with compression then check out this article:

http://computer.howstuffworks.com/file-compression.htm

Consider compressing the original video using a modern technology such as MPEG4 or DivX5. You could reduce the file size of a 20Mb MPEG1/2 video clip down to just 4Mb or even less. Also consider compressing the audio to just what you need. If there's just speech in the video clip then you can reduce the audio bitrate to 64kbps or even less, and still keep much of the important quality. Do look into the licensing of MPEG4 and DivX5, as well as the % of your users who will have the right codecs installed so that they can play your video clip correctly.

Dakota81 has recommended a very good open source tool, VirtualDub, for video compression. It's free and easy to use.

Depending on what you're trying to achieve, have you considered streaming the video? It can save both you and the user lots of bandwidth if they end up stopping the video before the end.

If much of your video is repeated, you could consider breaking it into pieces using VirtualDub and importing the unique fragments into Macromedia Flash where you can play and repeat them where necessary. The more repetition you have, the more file size you'll save by re-using the video fragments.

May

 

[xutopia]

I agree with Mayhem,

I use winrar for all my archival pusposes and consistently get better results than Zip (though video is dismall, 2-3% compression only). Gary

http://www.xutopia.com

Haran

 

[ChrisHirst]

There is a freeware utility called SplitFile available
on the windows freeware page of;

http://space.dolphin.free.fr

With this you can split the file into several parts and make the first section into an .exe file that will rebuild the original file once all the sections are on the users HD, not exactly what you were looking for but may give you another option.


Chris.
Indifference will be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?